Alexandra Bruell

It depends on the outlet and it depends on the reporter.

I've talked to a number of people who say that this is huge.

This enables them to do better coverage, to write about communities that have long gone uncovered, to potentially do more investigative reporting and cover stories and topics that they've been wanting to dig into.

I talked to one reporter and

At Axios, who covers Des Moines and is looking forward to the time that it's saving her so that she can go out and do more investigative work on water quality issues in the state.

There's a lot of excitement around that time saving and the ability to be able to do some real reporting and to more quickly and efficiently file FOIA requests for public records.

And we are starting to see some actual results.

One example I thought was very interesting is the NewsQuest example.

NewsQuest is owned by USA Today, the biggest local news business in the country.

They said in January they used AI to draft a quarter of the 60,000 stories they put out in January.

And that is the use of AI to do the first draft of these stories, which are then edited and reviewed by actual human editors.

But they say that this is going to lead to the potential hiring this year of more reporters.

Yeah, there's certainly a risk and over-reliance on AI.

We saw this in the early days of experimenting with AI in newsrooms.

We saw certain publishers using vendors for the creation and curation of content.

that ended up being wrong or putting errors into stories.

So there's a fear there in over-relying on AI to do the drafting of stories, to taking jobs.

There's also a fear that some of the time saved could be used for more AI slop or just, hey, reporter, you now have...

10% more time in your day, go generate more quick stories that aren't necessarily meaningful.

So there's a fear that this will just turn into a content engine, you know, in some places, as opposed to a means to good journalism.